How to use Email Subscriptions in Jetpack 1.2

The major new feature in Jetpack 1.2 is email subscriptions. Since we want you to get the most out of Jetpack, we’re taking a few minutes to explain what it does and how it works.

How does it work?

Many visitors to blogs never return. But if you can get them to subscribe, Jetpack will let them know when there’s a new post, so they can return and give you more traffic. This is similar to what Feedburner and others services do.

The reason why we can offer this in the Jetpack plugin is because of WordPress.com. The WordPress.com servers handle the messy work of sending and managing all the emails for you. Your blog is still yours, but subscriptions are handled, by us, for free, on your behalf.

How to turn Subscriptions on

All features in Jetpack 1.2 are on by default. Subscriptions, like all other features in Jetpack, requires no special magic to activate.

Visitors can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they have already commented on, so they can stay involved in the conversation.

Where will subscriptions appears on your blog?

The UI for Subscriptions can appear in two places. One is on by default, the other you have to active manually.

By default, you will see two new checkboxes on every blog post, at the bottom of the comments form. It will look something like this, depending on the theme you are using.

You can also add subscriptions to your sidebar, which we strongly recommend.

To add the Subscriptions Widget to your sidebar, go to your Dashboard. Then click on Widgets. You will see a widget called ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’. Click on it, and drag it to the sidebar on the right.

What will your blog readers see?

When visitors choose to subscribe, and type in their email address, in a few minutes they’ll get a confirmation email that looks like something like this:

If they click Confirm, they’ll receive a notification of every future post by email (each containing a link to Manage Subscriptions, so they can unsubscribe at any time). If they ignore the confirmation email, nothing will happen.

How to turn Subscriptions off

If you don’t want to use Subscriptions, you can turn it off in two steps.

Go to your Dashboard, then Jetpack. Then click on the Learn More button for Subscriptions. You’ll see a Deactivate button. Click it to turn Subscriptions off.

This is a great feature and I am grateful that you have implemented as I have always had trouble with Feedburner which seems very fickle and objected to some code on my site that I could never find.

However, the email is only sent, as far as I can see, when “posts” are updated. I run a rolling news service on several “pages” which are updated almost daily – but as yet I have not received an email!

Can the feature therefore be extended to updated “pages” too, say changes of more than 200 words?

I also want to send just a link to the new post instead of the entire thing. When is jetpack going to offer that? I need that feature to happen ASAP, does anyone else know of a different plug-in that will do that

It’s the plugin that I waited for. Thanks…
But just an advice, don’t put directely folders .pdf or other directely on the bogpost. The email don’t be sended. Sorry for my english.
I hope you understand
Great and Thanks

Hi Scott,
Thanks for the post and information. I agree that Feedburner gives me too many error messages so I would like to try this service.
Is there a way to set the time to send out the post? For example, I like to post twice in a day (sometimes) and if I do it early in the AM, my Feedburner feed sends out the e-mail between 11am and 1pm so my subscribers are only receiving 1 e-mail from me and not 2. This is an option in Feedburner, you can pick the time frame to send out your posts.
Thanks,
Sara

This is great, but it would be really awesome to have a little more control over the widget. For example, all the text in the widget is left justified, and I think it would be much better centered (like the other widgets on the same page) but unfortunately there’s no way to do this, so I haven’t been using the widget.

I’m so glad this feature came over via JetPack! I enjoyed it on my other site and found it clunky to do it through A-Weber. Anyhow…I notice that on my website the words are there for signing up “notify me…”, but not the check-boxes to actually do it! Any suggestions?

Where can we manage our users? I am currently using MailChimp to send out daily post emails via RSS, but I would love to import my users over to the WordPress.com Jetpack 1.2 subscriptions manager. I just don’t see much of a way to do this. Otherwise, it’ll have to wait, unfortunately, as I won’t be splitting my readers up between providers.

Am I missing where it can be configured? How do you manage your subscribers? How do you import your current subscribers so they’re all notified by the same plugin? How do we export our email list that we’ve built? It’s not very useful if you can’t get a list of your subscribers and their email addresses. I like the idea and it’s very easy to use but I can’t recommend using this unless it gives more control & ownership over “subscribers.”

You can view your subscribers through the Site Stats panel in Jetpack. From your WordPress Dashboard, go to your Jetpack menu and click on Site Stats. You should see a Subscriptions panel at the bottom of the page.

The system is currently set up so that users must opt-in to subscribing to your site. Importing users to your site isn’t possible under this method.

Is there any way to transfer old subscribers from Subscribe2 to the Jetpack subscription? We have 17 wordpress blogs that our school uses as classroom websites with about 20-30 parents already subscribed to each site. We’d love to use this since the email alerts look so much nicer and easily allows the subscribers to subscribe and unsubscribe from the emails as needed. It’d be nice to transfer all the subscribers over without having them need to reconfirm their email addresses.

It’s also helpful for us to know how many parents are subscribed to the emails, which was a nice thing to see in the Subscribe2 widget. Will this part of Jetpack get upgraded to include this eventually?

I also use Mailchimp for a weekly newsletter that pulls titles of the posts from the prior week. If the WP side had the same type of functionality (and lets me edit what gets sent through a template) then moving the stuff to WP would make sense. Alternately, could the subscribe functionality allow tie-ins to third party providers like MailChimp?

All was activated and widget could be activated also… but when email is writen and subcribe is clicked… an erroro apperas “There was an error when subscribing, please try again.”. Other JetPack apps been working well, like “Site Stat”. Hope to hear soon.

How can we manage subscribers in jetpack? Also, is there a way to adjust the settings of what is included in the emails? I noticed that if I insert photos into my blog post they are emailed to all subscribers. That is a big security hole in my mind, as I would rather not have the entire world owning photos of my toddler. At the same time, I want to be able to put photos in.

When sending the emails it sends the whole post. Is there a way to just have it send the Title of the post as a link to the site.
I want people to link to my site to read the post not read them in their emails. The purpose is to drive traffic to my website.

You can see the list of email subscribers by going to your Dashboard. Click Site Stats. Then scroll down to the bottom. On the bottom left you’ll see an area labeled subscriptions. Clicking on blog followers will show the list of email subscribers.

Great feature in itself but the implementation is too early. I think it’s a bad idea to send the whole post (and in a style different from the blog’s) to all subscribers. I want to attract people to my site, not send content away. I am switching it off.

How do you UNSUBSCRIBE people from the following your blog (‘subscriptions’) via Jetpack? I have started using a new subscription plugin but I am still using Jetpack for other things. The problem is now my users are getting 2 emails every time I make a new post.

(I have deactivated ‘subscriptions’ in Jetpack settings – it still sends email to users but with blank posts)

Hi, great feature! Would also appreciate more settings though. Especially one which doesn’t show my post’s image in e-mails. I’ve got a webcomic and I don’t want people to read it until they go to my site. Could you please consider creating such a setting?

I’ve been trying to find the answer for this question for days, I’m trying to edit/change the content in the Email Notification for a New post, my client’s blog is in Spanish and all the content, but the blog it self, in the email sent by[email redacted] is in English, I want to change it to Spanish and add some extra information to it, is this possible?

Also this blog is hosted in my server, and some of the link in this email (read more, the author name, the categories, and the tags ) link to my server domain instead of blog’s domain.

Me too! during development I activated and used the SUBSCRIBE widget. A few people found out and subscribed. I don’t want them getting emails every 10 minutes with each update I make to the site as I’m developing it. I’ve DEACTIVATED it in JetPack and removed the widget but people are still getting emails. HELP???

I do hope the answer soon changes to YES like most people I would like people to come to my site to read the blog. If they only read it in the email, they are not going to look through other parts of my site or click on the social media share buttons.

One question – I can’t seem to figure out how to change the content of the email they receive. No offense, but for my blog, “Howdy” as the intro just doesn’t fit, lol. Can you tell me how I can edit the outgoing email? Thanks so much!

I would also like (1) to get rid of “howdy” and have some control of the messages which go out and (2) be able to control my subscribers list. Having a confirmation go to people to prevent spamming is fine. But I’d like to be able to add and delete subscribers. Many of my blog’s members are in their 80s and 90s and I frequently get asked to “please do it for them.”

I love this feature, but is there a way to only send the subscribers an excerpt of the post to their email instead of the entire post? That way it would drive traffic to my site so they could read the entire post.

Is there a shortcode to use the subscription form, or just the overall widget, on a Page in WordPress? While the sidebar widget is good and all, we’d also like to have a page at the top that the visitor could specifically go to subscribe in case they missed the widget on the page.

Also, I see others have already recommended some things, but here are other features I was immediately looking for after trying this:
1) A shortcode to use on a page (as I inquire of above)
2) An admin option on whether to email the post excerpt or content
3) An admin option to add UTM variables to the post links in the email

(You say “You can also add subscriptions to your sidebar, which we strongly recommend,” but I don’t see another method to add it anywhere other than one of the widget areas, thus my confusion of it there is a shortcode or not.)

You may have already worked this out, Adam – but the plugin “Widgets on Pages” did the trick for me, as a workaround. You can see the result on my site at http://www.mayahealth.org/subscribe. Nothing fancy, but it got me there.

This is a great feature but I have one issue – I would like to change the welcome message that people receive when they sign up. Is there any way of doing this? I can’t find anything on the dashboard. Thanks

Does anyone know how to just include and excerpt in the email that is sent to the subscriber? I see that the question has been asked a couple of times in this post but no answer. I agree that you need to send them and excerpt of the post so they will want to click and read the rest of the post.

There is currently no way to just send an excerpt. As mentioned previously, the current version of this feature works exactly the same as it does on WordPress.com, with the same limitations. We’ll consider adding more options in future versions.

I posted a post accidentally, so I want to send an e-mail to all my followers to apologize as I removed the post.
Can I send e-mail to them?
I don’t want to copy the email address to into one e-mail…
SO I would need some notification service inbult… thanks
Viktor

One thing I would like to see adding onto this is to default sending out emails per blog post. Sometimes like Windows Live Writer needs to make a temp post and with the plugin so far, it emails out each time it happens.

Would be nice to see a feature to have a tick box to click “Send to followers” when making a post.

Just began using (and loving) Jetpack, but have a question I don’t think has been answered yet. Is it possible to get an actual URL to the email subscription box? I’d love to be able to write in my post “click here to subscribe via email” rather than always directing people to look at my sidebar and fill out the form. Could you let me know if this is possible? Thanks!

It worked fine originally… until a “new user” created their own WP site (subdomain/folder). Both the user sign-up and the site creation were AFTER the install and implementation of this widget on my main site. Now… all emails are sent for the USERS site (subscription email confirmation says that you’ve subscribed to the sub-site, not the main one.)

I see no controls to change it back. For that matter, why would it switch to a user’s site (one with no admin. rights) in the first place?

I’m fairly new to WP as it is. I love this little widget otherwise. Pleas help!

“Your comment is awaiting moderation.” is all I get after a week? Does anyone know how/where I can get a response? This is a bit of a disappointment (considering this is one of the ways they ask you to check first before contacting them directly). ANY help would be appreciated. Thank you.

I saw several posts here with the question “how can I customize the content of the confirmation email”? Currently it says Howdy…..and Howdy doesn’t fit my blog. Any thoughts in changing the content would be helpful.

I love this subscription option for my readers but would like to stop it sending emails again if I simply update the post. Sometimes I notice typos, or perhaps have an extra sentence to add after publication. At the moment that sends the whole email again which just seems spammy.

To get around that I have to go directly to the database and update there. That’s annoying.

Is there some way to restrict it to sending only when a post is first published?

Something strange. Anotther website which use Jetpack sends only their excerpt with Jetpack. And the webmaster told me he’s is it out of the box.
Could some other plugin change Jetpack’s behavior by “mistake” ?

For those who were wondering, THERE IS a way to send ONLY EXCERPT using Jetpack Subscriptions.
All you need is to use the “more” tag inside your article.

In HTML view, place the tag after your first lines which will be used as the excerpt.
You may even want to place an image in this first part of your post, so your subscribers will see it with the text in their mail.

I hope this feature will still be working this way in future Jetpack’s updates (unless they’ll just make it an option we can set up from the admin panel), ’cause it was a real pain to find out this solution !

If you’re having problems making it work, feel free to mail me. I’ll try to help if I can.

For those who were wondering, THERE IS a way to send ONLY EXCERPT using Jetpack Subscriptions.
All you need is to use the “more” tag inside your article.

In HTML view, place the tag after your first lines which will be used as the excerpt.
You may even want to place an image in this first part of your post, so your subscribers will see it with the text in their mail.

I hope this feature will still be working this way in future Jetpack’s updates (unless they’ll just make it an option we can set up from the admin panel), ’cause it was a real pain to find out this solution !

If you’re having problems making it work, feel free to mail me. I’ll try to help if I can.

This worked fairly well, except the read more link in the email “jumps” to the spot where the read more tag is placed. I’d really prefer the link to take the reader to the top of the page. I’ve tried editing the functions.php as has been recommended as a work around for “removing ‘read more’ jumps”, however it does not seem to work for jetpack subscription emails.

Has anyone gotten it to work so that the jump takes the reader to the top?

I really wish Jetpack properly supported a way to prevent sending the entire post to subscribers.

Eddy – Does this change the way my posts are viewed in RSS or on my blog’s homepage? I would like my email subscribers to receive an excerpt but I want my RSS subscribers to be able to see the whole thing.

how can i remove ” notify me of new posts via email” as shown below. i want to remove as i already have sidebar widgets of the same to “subscribe me”. can you help me which php file to edit this text. Also my font styles are different then the follow me widget style,can anyone have idea how to change that?

I have 176 registered “users” and about 25 comment and blog followers. What are the 176 users receiving? Where and how are they registering? Are they mostly spam? How can I communicate with them? I am tempted to delete all of them. Is there any reason not to?

Registered users are part of core WordPress. These are users who have registered locally at your site to comment on posts, for example. These users are not part of Jetpack subscriptions and only receive notices from Jetpack if they have also signed up to receive email subscriptions.

Great tool BUT need an option to just sent an excerpt, why visit the site if you canb read teh whole post in an email. My subscribers are complaining about the length of some of their emails as a result. Is there another plugin that will do this? And, if I install that will I lose all my Jetpack subscribers?

How on earth do you localize the subscription emails that a reader gets after checking the follow blog/comments check boxes?

The text is not in the PO file! I’ve rescanned it already. The Comments email reads:

—
Howdy.
You recently followed one of my posts. This means you will receive an email when new comments are posted.
To activate, click confirm below. If you believe this is an error, ignore this message and we\’ll never bother you again.
Blog Name: Blog URL:
Confirm Follow
If you want to see all of the blogs you follow on the web in one easy place, sign up for a WordPress.com account.
–

Along with quite a few of the others using Jetpack, I would really like my subscribers to only see a portion of my posts in their email, and have to click through to my site to view the entire post. When I started using Jetpack, my daily hits lowered from over 500 a day to under 200, which I suspect is because most people can now see the entire post in their email and don’t have to click to my site to read it. As I have sponsors, it’s important to me that people click to my actual site to expose my sponsors to traffic.
Are there any plans to add a feature like this to Jetpack?

Thanks for the update, Tim. I posted on this same matter a couple of months ago. I was really surprised to find that Jetpack sends my entire posts, thereby reducing traffic to my site and my ability to gauge readership. Sounds like you guys are working on an update to correct this problem. Please let me (us) know when you may have an ETA, as it would greatly improve the product.

I am just testing the Jetpack subscription feature on a blog I will be launching soon. I’ve found that the new post email contains all my post shortcodes and such. Is there a way to have it strip out any shortcodes or force it to use the excerpt text instead of the full post? I am using a professionally-designed template that has various custom shortcodes, so I’d rather not have the email notifications cluttered with all the shortcodes.